What 671 Million Push Notifications Say About How People Spend Their Day

What 671 Million Push Notifications Say About How People Spend Their Day pixelwork

What 671 Million Push Notifications Say About How People Spend Their Day

Push Notifications - Consumption of daily media consumption

The push notifications They are a cornerstone of every mobile app's engagement and retention strategy, yet we know very little about them. I've previously written about why 60% of users opt out of push notifications and why some are receiving a 40% CTR.

Let's see some push notification data lean plum, a mobile marketing automation tool, which breaks down 671 million push notifications to discover some interesting trends, especially on the day.

Average Monday-Friday push notification activity in North America

Let's first look at marketers when they are sending push notifications, by time, and how users interact. The following graph shows the Metrics for sent and opened push notifications on average weekdays in North America, in a sample of millions of notifications. The data is normalized by local time and represents the sending and opening for the specified time. The blue line shows the number of shipments and uses the left axis. The red line shows the opening number and uses the right axis.

You can see an interesting trend here - you can see how shipping and opening rise throughout the day, with a small peak around midday, a little largest around 3 pm, and largest at night. The post-night trend is interesting – after 6 p.m., in relative terms, the opening of push notifications has an upward trenda, with respect to the previous hours, and those that are sent are less. This indicates that while mobile apps are delivering a ton of pre-evening notifications, they might be more effective after the evening, when engagement seems high.

Either way, this curve is very interesting, and we should look at a typical day to understand the behavioral patterns of how people spend their days.

Studies on the average day reinforce this trend

The Amreican Time Use Survey shows why the aforementioned notification graph makes sense. The video simulates the average day-by-minute activities for 1,000 people, and what they do.

Watch the video of the visualization here or click the link below:

https://svbr.wistia.com/medias/qw0sv6nt25

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In the morning hours of 7-9 a.m., people are waking up and beginning their morning rituals – eating, self-care, commuting to the office, and starting to work. These morning tasks consisting of getting to the office and could justify why open push notifications are low before 12 pm.

Around the 15:00 There is an interesting change in activity, seen in the video that also correlates with a higher sending push and open rate. This could be because of the people taking a coffee break or going outside. Good time to take a look at your phone. By 18:00 p.m., most people have left work and begin leisure activities.

It makes sense then why more push notifications open from 6-9pm. Work is done and people are likely to be on their phones, browsing apps and catching up on social media. The shift to leisure activities lasts a few hours and by 10 pm, most people have moved on to personal attention and sleep. The peak in engagement from opening notifications follows a similar trend to that of free time after work.

Media consumption

Ok, we see that leisure activities correlate with a greater opening of push notifications. What exactly do people do during these leisure hours? The following Media Consumption graph of daily media consumption shows some interesting trends:

Couple of obvious notes:

  • Internet usage has two main peaks: one at 8 and a bigger one at 7 pm.
  • The use of iOS and Android apps starts in the morning around 7, slowly builds up throughout the day before falling to its peak at 9 pm.
  • TV is clearly a post-work activity, with a huge peak between 7 and 11pm.

You can compare it with this similar graphical analysis of the United Kingdom, done by Ofcom:

With both tables, you can see that television seems to be an important part of leisure hours, especially after work. Voice communication tends to be limited during the day, while lines of communications (SMS/email) occur throughout the day.

Engagement of Push Notifications VS with Media Consumption

To tie this daily pattern to Leanplum push notification interaction data, we can speculate why people interact at night. I bet we are seeing the effect of mobile as the second screen, where people interact with push notifications, while they happen to be watching TV. They probably have their phones in their pocket or nearby, and can easily catch up on apps.

Source: andrewchen.co